Saturday, January 28, 2012

The success at the polls of Islamists (as political activists
who draw on the Quran as inspiration for their social ideology have
come, willy-nilly, to be known) tells us little about Islam and much
about Arab society today.

In the wake of the Arab Spring, Islamists have flexed their
muscles in countries as far apart as Morocco, Palestine and Yemen, and
won handily at the polls in Egypt and Tunisia. Of the 22 legal political
parties in Algeria, six are Islamist, and Islamists make up the most
influential opposition force in Jordan. And in a remarkable display of
prowess that would have seemed unthinkable a mere 12 months ago, the
Muslim Brotherhood, in its guise as the Freedom and Justice Party, has
secured in post-revolutionary Egypt the most seats in the country’s
parliamentary elections. And last Monday, with the clear mandate they
had gained at the polls, their parliament speaker, Mohammad Sa’ad
Katatni, opened the inaugural session of the lower house of parliament.

Even in Syria, where the irrelevant phantasm of Baathism — an
ageing concoction of pan-Arabist and Euro-nationalist ideology dreamed
up by a Levantine secularist in 1940 — has retained its grip on
government, the power of Islamists, albeit so far underground, is
evident. There is not, in other words, a single country in the Arab
world that does not have an Islamist vanguard.

These folks, as we speak, are preparing to play a dominant role
in drafting new constitutions in their countries reflecting the new
ideology of hope engendered by the Arab awakening, a movement that seeks
to define a citizen’s right to live freely and independently not as a
luxury but as a rigorous need. That indeed would be, well, yes, a
revolutionary transformation for societies that, since independence well
over six decades ago, have been broken in back and spirit, and whose
people had for generations been socialised on an ethic of fear, defeat
and despair. And it looks like the Islamists will be the agents of that
transformation.
How do we explain this phenomenon, then, and what does it portend for the future?
To be sure, the Islamist revival in the Arab world may have begun,
should we assume a point of departure for it, as far back as 1967, in
the wake of the devastating military defeat of the June War, when Arabs
collectively felt betrayed by the hodge-podge of secular ideologies they
had put their trust in throughout the first three quarters of the 20th
century, ideologies like Nasserism and Baathism, Communism and Greater
Syria nationalism, socialism and pan-Arabism, that now were exposed as
having been hollow and meaningless, essentially worthless imports from
the West. As a massive silence descended upon Arabs at the time, which
became a kind of rhetoric in its way, it seemed that there was no better
ideology to turn to than the one that had grown out of the very bosom
of their own culture — Islam.
Understandably, the activists who pioneered the Islamist
movement, at the least in countries in the Levant and the Maghreb, were
born again Islamists, originally secular ideologues who had turned to
Islam after their secular ideologies began to appear impotent and
irrelevant. These activists’ mass appeal became evident, even in
traditionally secular societies such as Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and
Jordan, after they buttressed their vision with intimate responsiveness
to peoples’ discontent with, disdain for and alienation from the ruling
elite. And, above all, to peoples’ everyday, pedestrian needs.
When Uncle Ahmad, for example, the name we give the common
impoverished Arab in these countries, needed a good school, a reliable
clinic, a warm coat, adequate food and a summer camp for his kids, he
did not turn to corrupt officials, who cared little about him in the
first place, to address these needs. He turned instead to the mosque,
seeking representatives of the Islamist group nearest him who he knew,
from observing their modest life-style and moral rectitude, were above
reproach. And a strong affinity inevitably developed between care-giver
and the common man. The latter remembered all that when he went to cast
his vote.

Truth be told, this state of affairs is characteristic of all
deprived societies in which authority had callously turned its back on
its people. In other words, when the state becomes corrupt and
ineffectual, when it demonstrates its unwillingness to meet ordinary
folks’ needs, civil society will in time establish an alternative order
within the state, a shadow state, if you will.

All of which reminds us of the first scene in Godfather I.

Godfather I relevant to our theme here? Yes, very much so, I say. In
that scene in Godfather I, an iconic film in American cinematic art,
Amerigo Bonasera, a lowly mortician from New York’s Little Italy, fills
the screen as he despairingly tells Don Corleone: “I believe in America,
but ...” The Italian immigrant believed in America, but its justice
system had failed him miserably. His daughter’s honour had been violated
by two local boys who — after being apprehended and brought to court to
stand trial — were acquitted on a technicality. To rub salt into his
wounds, the boys even snickered at him as they walked out, free men. He
wanted justice, and he wanted the Godfather to mete it out.
There is a zoom-out on the Don, played by the indomitable Marlon
Brando, head of the Cosa Nostra Corleone family, who responds
reproachfully in one of the most textually telling lines in the film:
“Why didn’t you come to me first?”

Bonasera should have known better than to go to the authorities
in the first place. Italian immigrants at the time, in the 1940s, were
still anchored in their Sicilian culture and its norms: to settle a
dispute or to right a wrong committed against you, you did not turn to
the cops, who were corrupt and uncaring, but to that network of local
Cosa Nostra chiefs who knew how to take care of their own. That is how
it was in Italy in those days, and Italian immigrants brought that
tradition with them to the New World. Cosa Nostra was born at the same
time as the modern Italian state in the late 19th century, a weak state
that could not, or would not, protect its citizens and guarantee them
jobs and services, let alone social justice.
That’s also how it was, as well, before civil rights acts were
legislated in the US, for African-Americans, who often turned to their
church leaders because there was no one else to turn to for
representation of their political and civil rights. And that’s how it
was for Iranians, on the eve of the 1979 revolution, who had turned to
their mosques to seek equity because the state had prevented them from,
or punished them for, agitating for what was due to them.

Guess what? There are times when that shadow state, probably by
fiat of the imagination inherent in history, comes to power. And when
that shadow state itself becomes the state, you have to talk to it. No
two ways about it. When you don’t, as the US did not in 2006 after Hamas
became the ascendant authority, everybody ends up paying a heavy price
in human suffering so that Washington will sustain a dysfunctional
political system rejected by its people in fair, free and open
elections.

Today Islamists are all over the place, all over the Arab world,
poised to pre-empt and then define their societies’ tomorrow. And what
the devil whimsical foreign policy will the US pursue then? Stay tuned.

Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in
Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a
Palestinian Exile.